SJ Notices

Apologies for the absence of posts over the past week. I was unwell with a particularly pernicious bug.
Thanks to all who commented, emailed, and phoned with kind wishes. They were much appreciated!
I’m once again in rude health and will resume with the second half of the report on my meeting with the women of the [...]

Your normally robust blogger is currently experiencing symptoms that have previously fuelled media panic and the stockpiling of essential items.
While I am a number of months late for swine flu, and a couple of years from the Avian variety, I’ve never been particularly concerned with keeping abreast of fashion, and am, in marketing parlance, a [...]

Not long after this blog began in May, a phenomenon emerged: some of the more interesting developments began to take place either via email, or offline altogether.

After having lived away from the community – both in Australia and overseas – for ten years, I began reconnecting with Jews from the various sub-communities, and from different generations.

This was both a refresher course (some things hadn’t changed) and a steep learning curve, as I navigated through the labyrinthine arcana of communal politics and caught up on developments among the younger generations.

Since returning from the hiatus and outing myself in early August, blog-related activity offline has become even more frenetic. Being “out” has given me the opportunity to meet numerous people, and some of the more inspiring and exciting developments seem to be coming from Generations X and Y.

This piece was originally published in The AJN in September.
In February, I received an email that had gone viral in Melbourne’s Jewish community. It claimed that owners of a Caulfield-area restaurant were anti-Semites and urged readers to boycott it. On the one hand, something in the email’s tone aroused my suspicion. On the other, I [...]

I was approached today by a journalist from The Sunday Age, Tom Hyland, who is writing an article on “the debate within the Jewish community about how the community is represented in the wider public debate on contentious public issues, particularly the Palestine-Israel conflict.” His editor asked him to write the piece in light of the Lateline episode, but the angle is not restricted to Seven Jewish Children.

We, at the Sensible Jew, are Australian Jews who are tired of bitching at family dinners about unrepresentative swill (ie.communal leaders) and Leowensteinian lunatic leftists.
Where are the moderates?
Well, that’s the problem: moderates are just less motivated than their radical brothers and sisters to go media whoring. It might be [...]